Thanks guys! We'll keep this thread up to date, as always And this Sunday of course with the regular video developer diary.

Artificial intelligence was a big part of this week’s accomplishments.

In this week's dev diary introduction I speak Hebrew. I think.

Julian improved the enemy AI. Sarahul can now hear things, see telekinesis and terraforming and no longer stand there ignoring everything.

Daniel finished the sand dragon concept. This will become a great boss battle.

Ricardo works on the in-game spellbook (you’ll see a mockup in the video). In this book you’ll be able to browse through your spells, get descriptions, read up on the backstory and little pieces of information you get during your adventure. It’s cool to stop by and browse every once in a while and it looks gorgeous.

And yes, I'm also wondering why the titles of the dev diaries are so strange ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

In this week's dev diary we talk about:

Julian seriously discovered he can change fonts for the intro to make it look more techie, since he's the tech guy...

Things can now burn. We show a Sarahul tent that gets burned to the ground after treated with fire magic.

The player character now has all animations, no more sliding on the ground when levitating rocks and moving.

Jason heavily improved the fire particle effect. When rocks get enhanced with fire, it now looks so much better!

Sarahul are still a little dumb, they kill each other

Throwing a burning object now looks like a cool comet ;)

Julian shows how to disarm a Sarahul alarm trigger with a fire enhanced rock.

Close-up rendering of a Sarahul sword.

We show the Sarahul arch mage boss - I think for the first time.

We completely re-designed the temples in Son of Nor. They always looked a bit too alien for the world of Son of Nor. Daniel sat down and drew new concepts for them, re-imagined. And we're very happy how this turned out. The new temples look much more integrated into the world, ancient, with carvings in the stone.

Julian gives you an in-depth tour of the fire temple camp level we're working on. Enjoy!

We've been greenlit today! Son of Nor is coming to Steam! After our successful Kickstarter this is a huge dream come true! Thank you everybody for your votes. We're all smiling right now, talking about it in our perma Google Hangout.

Then, a few minutes later, we're watching the Unite 2013 keynote live, as Unity streams their event with YouTube On Air. And what logo do we spot in their keynote starting screen? Son of Nor was on of the games featured in that screen. A huge acknowledgement for us. I'm going to grab a bottle of champagne now, be back later.

And thanks again for all your support! Without all the help we've been getting during the last year it wouldn't have worked out like that at all!

The new “please vote for us” banner that we wanted to sport this week is now obsolete. The banner is sad, but we’re happy!

Tobi is back! He was one of the early team members of stillalive. Then he submerged in university duties but got back recently. He is working on optimizing the terraforming algorithm and making it multithreaded. It should bring a nice performance boost! But such a process is not without bugs. Some optimizations didn’t yield the wanted result.

Telekinesis was greatly optimized. Picked up rocks no longer block your line of sight and get automatically placed beside you instead of in front..

Placing objects in exact positions for puzzles is still possible by sensing what the player’s intentions are.

Tearing out rocks from walls doesn’t feel easy. We introduced a resistance that pulls you back and you really need to tear out the rock with force.

Daniel drew a more detailed face of the mysterious women we showed you last week.

We show a sneak peek of the Scarab Queen enemy. We’re still implementing it.

We celebrate our 50th dev diary this week! Let's take a look at what we achieved in the last year and what's new this week. Looking back, it was a long journey

We're 50 and thus we're doing this for almost a year now! That's why we take the opportunity to look back at what we achieved since the first dev diary!

It's been a long journey with many ups and equally many and violent downs. We're still here and it seems we're going to go on Thank YOU for hanging in there with us, for being interested, asking questions, critically commenting on our progress (liking our positive progress, constrictuvely calling out what you don't like). Thank YOU for a great 50 weeks. You're awesome!

Many of us at stillalive studios work on Kickstarter rewards. Adrian modeled the Son of Nor medallion for the collector's edition backers. We produced two physical copies to check out the materials!

The mysterious woman you know all about went into the modeling phase and progresses nicely.

We show you another key figure in Son of Nor's story. The "Shrouded Figure". So we now have 2 characters we can't talk about. But we can show 'em.

A lot of work is going into the user interface (UI). Ricardo started doing flow charts and mockups some time ago and he now works with Jason to implement the first iterations, while Jason experimented a lot with layout, design and buttons. Many, many buttons.

This has been a long week! Or at least it feels like it! Julian is back for this week's dev diary and he gets a little bit more personal by sharing his experience at Devmania and what he has been working on to improve the way feedback can be provided for Son of Nor.

Bernd, Julian, Daniel and Tobi assisted at Devmania 2013. It was awesome! And they took pictures to show you guys. There was also a game jam in which the stillalive team participated in.

Phoenix is the game we created at Devmania! It's kind of a tower defense game where you are a phoenix that has to protect its egg. We'll wrap up some things and then post the link in one of the next dev diaries. Stay tuned!

Julian has finally implemented the magic charges mechanic to be able to store various magic abilities at the same time. The crystals that hold the charges are still to be implemented, but yay! We can now wreak more havoc without being interrupted!

Comfort features: A small little detail Julian implemented is a mechanic that allows the game to be smoother and less bothersome.

Feedback feedback feedback. This is super important! Being able to provide it easily is as important. The last tool we used was too complicated and had too many features we actually didn't need. Now do check the new feedback tool Julian worked on the whole weekend to make everyone's lifes easier. Ours and yours as soon as you lay your hands on our new builds!

Jam-packed episode about cluttering, Sarahul mages, scorpions, new player characters and work we do outside the game. Ricardo shows you around.

2 episodes ago we had our 50th dev diary, which was a cool round number. This time it's #52. Since we do this every week, it's been 52 weeks, meaning a full year of dev diaries! Turns out we started earlier. Whatever, it's episode 52, we're happy and take every chance to celebrate.

Beautifying a level (i.e. adding plants and stuff) is a long process. We haven't got enough manpower in that area. Ricardo is learning the ropes of Unity to help out.

Ricardo shows the current state of the Bible of Nor. A combined art book / lore book that's going to be available digitally and as physical copy for backers of the collector's editions.

The map of Noshrac is another asset Ricardo shows off. The map of the world of Son of Nor that's going to be printed as poster.

Programming of the Sarahul mage is progressing. An enemy type that doesn't fight with sword or bow but can use magic.

Ricardo shows an early stage of the scorpion enemy. An enemy we're working on for a long time now but have had multiple problems implementing.

Ruben worked on a new player character we call the "Weathered Man"

The new temples we're working on are progressing. What we could only show as a rough blockout in the past dev diaries is taking shape. Alex and Daniel are working on it.

We reached a milestone with the Son of Nor project this week and everybody and their brother committed to SVN what they've been working on.

It's time to say hello in Gaeilge, aka Irish.

There's a new variation of the Fire Temple Camp level. You know the one at night, now there's one at dawn. It's in line with the story for when you get OUT of the Fire Temple after having unraveled its secrets.

A Sarahul army moves through the camp after you get out. They look like Morlocks of the movie Time Machine ;)

The camp has been extended. New content above the scaffold that we showed some dev diaries ago.

New content: a new canyon sidearm that leads up to the actual Fire Temple was created.

New machinery has been placed into the Fire Temple. Blockout assets are slowly being replaced by more polished models as work on those models progresses.

There's a new enemy type in the Fire Temple, uuuh.

Simultaneously, we're working on a completely NEW area that comes after the Fire Temple. It's in a veeery rough shape still.

Good news for Fire Temple Camp backers: the build of the pre-alpha level for the add-on backers is almost done!

Good news for Sandbox backers: An updated build is coming your way for in the Humble Store! We've updated it with an Essence Magic source, all the relevant spell combinations and we're going to place an enemy spawner for you so you can try smashing some enemies for yourself! Watch out for an email stating the updated build being ready for download And don't forget to send in feedback with our built-in F5 menu!

New content was added to the Fire Temple Camp, the Fire Temple and Lur's Temple this week. We also show a picture of a new playable character.

We added terraforming and physics challenges to Cinder Valley, which btw is the official name for the level we called the "Fire Temple Camp".

More work went into Cinder Valley to give it more verticality. We also added post-image effects to tune in on the atmosphere we'd like the level to convey.

Ricardo shows scenes from within the Fire Temple with all the work that went into it this week. New rooms, textures, some polishing, mechanisms.

The big empty area (early blockout) Chris showed last week (code name Lur's Temple, official name Yant’shaza) got a pretty big update. It's a Sarahul temple complex and you can see plenty of buildings now.

Since Yant’shaza is a pretty big map, it needs to be loaded in parts. Julian worked on a transition / gate mechanism to unload parts of the level and load in new areas. WIP.

Wind gusts push you around and make it hard to stay undetected while hiding on rooftops.

Ruben almost finished modeling and texturing a new playable character for you to choose from. The weathered man. You can see portrait pic of him in the video.

Play Phoenix, our Devmania 2013 game jam game. And lead dev Julian talks about localization and shows pressure plate mechanisms.

More work on the game's menu. Before polishing it and making it pretty, the tech behind it needs to be solid. Especially translation of menu text is in the focus of this week's dev efforts.

Menu in English and German are working. We're working on implementing the cyrillic script.

Storing multiple elements worked already in the game, now we added a rudimentary visual representation to show the stored elements and the number of charges left. It looks ugly, don't look at it for too long.

Physics based pressure plates were implemented that react to the weight placed on them. Example: A pressure plate reacting to 150kg of weight cannot be triggered with a 120kg rock. But if the player steps on the plate, too, bringing the weight over 150kg, the plate will work.

We were at Devmania 2013 a month ago and participated in a 12 hour game jam (=an entire game was made from idea to implementation in only 12 hours). The resulting game was "Phoenix". A tower defense type game with no towers, but a giant burning bird. We released it for you to play and have fun. How many waves do you survive? How many creeps could you kill? Post some highscores here! http://stillalive-studios.com/projects/phoenix